The Blog of International Judicial Assistance | By Ted Folkman of Murphy & King

Lago Agrio: ICC Prosecutor Rejects LAPs’ Complaint

Posted on April 3, 2015

In October 2014 I noted a complaint the LAPs submitted to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court asking her to begin an investigation with an eye toward bringing charges against Chevron. As I noted at the time, “It would be very surprising to me if the LAPs’ claims have merit.”
I can’t say with certainty that the prosecutor agreed with me, but in any case she has decided not to proceed. According to her statement, first reported by the right-wing rag the Free Beacon, some of the claims seemed to fall outside the ICC’s temporal jurisdiction because they involve occurrences prior to 2002, and others seemed to fall outside the ICC’s subject matter jurisdiction, because they do not involve genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity.

It’s not clear to me that the LAPs have failed in what they set out to do. As I noted in my introduction to Doug Cassel’s post on the ICC complaint, in light of the apparent hopelessness of the complaint, “maybe the ICC complaint should not be read as a serious effort to initiate a prosecution, but rather as a political document or as a PR document.” But in any event, the LAPs have not succeeded in opening a new front in the ligitation.

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